How to Write Great Content for Search (that delivers)
It's not enough to just publish content that answers questions. To write truly great content that delivers in search, you need a plan
TL;DR
Great content needs to hit three of the four E’s - educate, engage, entertain and empower - to truly resonate with your audience.
Uniqueness and originality are everything. Anyone can answer questions effectively now. You have to stand out. For people and the algorithm. Be memorable.
Understand your audience - Who are they? Where are they? How do they consume content?
Amplifying your content has never been more important. Boost your article early by sharing, amplifying and engaging in the industry you’re in. Build a profile.
What makes content great?
Great content stands out. It’s memorable. So memorable in fact, that people in the industry want to share it as part of their online persona. Great content gets people talking. Thinking.
There’s no one size fits all for great content. What makes it difficult is people.
Bloody people.
Some like to take their time, scouring over every word in the article. Others skim read or pick out the important information. Others are visual learners. What’s great for some may not quite hit the mark for others.
And that’s OK. No matter what your mother tells you, you can’t please everyone.
But you can create memorable experiences that bring the right people back. You can leverage your expertise, have unique elements, make it easy to digest and use different multimedia formats.
The four E’s - educate, entertain, engage and empower. Good content takes time. If you rush it, you’ll get what you deserve.
Tumbleweed and a shitty on a stick.
What makes it suck?
Blandness. Banality. A lack of uniqueness. An inability to tell a story. Over the last decade, websites have got away with creating subpar content because it was easy to rank.
And in some way, that’s no longer enough anymore.
Once we understood how the algorithm worked, the content became blander and blander. It was easy for strong brands to create boring detritus with some SEO-optimised headers and for it to ‘work.’
And by work, I mean drive ungodly amounts of revenue for very little effort. In fairness, it still does in some cases.
We are living in a sea of sucky content. Barry Adams wrote a very good article on the Quality Bell Curve of Online Content and how the rise of AI will increase the amount of decidedly average content.
Because it’s easier. It’s easier to trot some ideas through an LLM. Regurgitate the same bilge your competition has. When people and brands have targets, and said targets get harder and harder to hit, something has to give.
Good content has to hit a lot of different markers. If it isn’t engaging, easy to consume, unique, informative and either educational or entertaining (in my opinion, both), it will be forgotten.
Or remembered for the wrong reasons.
If you ever want to look at the best pure search content, find the weakest brand(s) outranking the strong ones. It isn’t a level playing field. So look for those pages and people outperforming the norm.
In the same way that Google looks for brands and pages that outperform their ‘expected’ CTR*, you can do the same.
*Essentially, if your content outperforms its expected CTR based on its position, that’s a great sign
The Four E’s of Content Creation
Educate
Entertain
Engage
Empower
Normally, I don’t trot these things out because it always feels a bit psychobabble to me. Like when your company pays for those personality tests that place everyone into four colours. Green for nerds, red for bullies etc, etc.
But it’s a pretty good framework for trying to create something memorable.
I think each piece of content you write should hit at least three of these four. Just because you’re creating educational content, does that mean it shouldn’t be entertaining?
Of course it doesn’t.
Now, you might be stymied by a brand’s tone of voice.
‘You can’t compare that credit card company to Pol Pot. No, Genghis Khan wasn’t misunderstood.’
We’ve all been there.
But that doesn’t mean your educational content shouldn’t also be entertaining. Or that your entertaining content shouldn’t also be educational.
Educational content that draws people in, engages them and entertains can also empower them. It gives people a voice. It makes them want to share your content.
Creating content that resonates
Now, I don’t think the four E’s are perfect. I think there are some additional considerations I’d like to lobby for.
Resonate
Consistency
Audience
So then we have E-E-E-E-R-C-A. Or maybe R.A.C.E.E.E.E?
I’m not sure it’s quite as catchy, but I think these three are non-negotiables. Your content has to resonate with the right people. That means you have to know your industry and your audience. And you have to be consistent.
Your content should speak to people. It should be so good that the right people in your industry should feel compelled to share it. You need it to resonate to such a level that it creates brand advocates.
Consistency is Key
Yes, consistency in terms of output. Time and effort really cannot be replaced.
But consistency in terms of voice and style is as important. A good acid test for content is were you to remove the author or brand and read it as a standalone entity, does it stand up?
Do you still care about it? Better yet, would you still know who wrote it?
I remember the old Brian Dean (of Backlinko fame) articles that were broken up perfectly, Short, snappy sentences.
Lots of paragraphs. Visually stimulating. Recognisable.
I wouldn’t say they were entertaining, but were they educational, engaging and empowering? Absolutely. Three of the four, you see.
Knowing Your Audience
The three main considerations are;
Who are they?
Where are they?
How do they consume content?
I would say building audience personas has only recently come to the fore in search. We toyed with the idea years ago, but there was rarely a need to.
Why bother when traffic was so easy?
Now, you do need to collaborate with departments that can run proper audience and user research. It’s the bedrock of an audience and editorial strategy.
Who are our users, where do they live, what do they like and what do they need from us?
Miro have quite a good guide to building a user persona that goes beyond demographic details. It’s about understanding your users. The more you understand them, the easier it is to create content that speaks to their pain and gain points.
You can’t bucket everyone into the same few buckets. But it will help you create content that resonates with the important majority. You can cite the right sources and statistics, share in the right channels and target their frustrations like you know them intimately.
Rand has spoken at length about how important it is to know not just who your audience are, but where they are.
It’s not Google. Nobody ‘hangs out’ in Google outside of sad acts like us.
It’s much less likely that prospective customers will find your brand through traditional search as a first time experience.
Which is a good thing for most brands. It’s much more difficult to be entertaining and memorable through search. There’s a structure and rigour to it that isn’t applied across other channels. It’s a much more risk averse channel.
Answer questions, get traffic and the revenue follows.
Social provides brands and people the chance to be a little… Let’s say pithier. So if you work for a brand with some form of personality (God, I hope that’s true), then it will help you stand out.
Hopefully in a positive way.
Consider whether search really forms part of a consistent cross-channel experience. Or whether you’re just writing banal guff and hoping it ranks because keywords.
I don’t use SparkToro, but have been reliably told it is excellent for total audience research. Not just for SEO in isolation.
Making Great Content for Search (and People)
See what I did there? Twisted it on you.
So, how do we make this work for our glorious algorithm? How do we appease the almighty without falling into the sea of content slop?
Let’s take it as read that we’ve had a brilliant idea and the required expertise and understanding to create something great.
The easy part…
How can we make sure it’s seen? Because let’s be clear, Google absolutely doesn’t always reward the best content.
Which, as a sidenote, is why consistency is important. Cream does tend to rise to the top if you know what to do.
Obviously you can just copy your content and post it on Linkedin Pulse and it’ll dominate rankings because Google’s idea of brand strength and value is somewhat inflated.
Step 1: Understanding the algorithm
I’ve written in depth about how Google uses engagement metrics and how the news algorithm works. So they might be good jumping off points.
If we just focus on the content itself and remove the brand and authority level signals, I’d say the fundamentals are;
Driving positive engagement signals - pogo-sticking, last good click, on page interactions etc
Making content resonate for multiple learning types - scannable, multi-format and rich media
Information gain - Basically unique content. Which we’ll come onto shortly)
If you can nail these three, you’re off to a great start.
Step 2: Writing for real people (but structuring for bots)
Google can’t actually understand content. It uses a combination of word embeddings (to see how closely related words are and to predict what should come next), entity matching (to analyse groupings and characteristics of words and articles) and NLP (the 2021 MUM model meant that Google can now acquire context from all forms of media).
It’s all about analysing the page at a word, entity and contextual level. Predicting what should come next. Creating a unified, complete response.
It’s a remarkable algorithm that was once built on the premise of links being the hallmark of quality. Since the system was able to be gamed, it’s now built by weighting trillions of interactions of the great unwashed stored in Chrome.
This means that while Google can’t actively understand content (although it can certainly predict what words should come next to each other), it uses the next best thing.
How we all see the content at a query level.
So you have to write for people. Because we are the only true appreciators of great content.
But you have to structure the content for bots. Understand the relationship between headings, semantic HTML and linking effectively between articles. Help search engines understand what content you deem important.
Step 3: Uniqueness
Ah, unique content. Information gain my old friend. The basic premise that your content needs to add something new to the ecosystem. We’ve had the days of copying verbatim the content that ranks in position 1. We need to do better.
It’s why expertise and real world experience is important. Because it adds something that is difficult to copy. It’s hard to fake.
And there are so many ways of doing it.
Internal, unique data
Multiple datasets combined
Unique videos and images
Surveys
Statistics
Investigative journalism
Anything new is perceived as information gain. And search engines feed off it. They are hungry for new and improved information that creates a better user experience.
According to this patent - Contextual estimation of link information gain - Google scores documents based on the additional information they offer to a user, considering what the user has already seen.
The system aims to prioritise and show documents that provide new insights rather than repeating information. As the wealth of knowledge available continues to increase, it’s more and more challenging to return the best result(s).
To do this, the algorithm assesses novelty, relevance and usefulness. The additional information provided. Its relevance to the audience and the value it adds.
You have to add something no one else has.
In a microcosm, this is why LLMs shouldn’t be able to create content as good as the best humans. They can regurgitate, transform and transpose content in every way you can imagine. But they can’t do this.
As Despina Gavoyannis says, ‘LLMs Don’t Reward Originality, They Flatten It.’
Step 4: Readability
Before you even think about Google and algorithms, think of people first. Think of the content and content creators that you value and come back to.
I guarantee the content is easy to consume.
Short, snappy sentences
Short paragraphs
Rich multimedia
Headings to break things up
Bullet points and list (hint hint) for scannable information
They tell a story
I could go on. But broadly, tell a story. Structure the story well. Hook people in at the beginning. You can always run your content through something like WebFX’s Readability Test as a starting point.
I like using a TL;DR format. I think it gives people what they want quickly and entices them in. If they aren’t ready to read 3,000 words of beautifully crafted content (I’m sure their family couldn’t bear the pain of this admittance), I can still add value.
But emotional hooks are great too. YouTubers use this all the time. You only have a few seconds to grab people’s attention. Just 1.7 according to this article. It’s all about CTR and watch time.
The YouTube algorithm isn’t so different.
Whilst Google uses engagement metrics, it has a pretty good baseline understanding of the types and format of content that will deliver success. If you’re writing long, drawn out sentences and lack rich multimedia, do you think you stand a chance?
Well, if you work for a big brand, maybe.
Step 5: Standing out in search
You’re pretty limited in search in terms of standing out. Particularly as Google rewrites over 60% of title tags.
We know things better than you.
Agreed. But it’s still my content, you blithering machine. When you rewrite a title that accuses the wrong person of being a paedophile, who do you think they’ll come for? The trillion dollar search giant or the struggling publisher?
Anyway, there are a few things you should still consider;
Titles - there are five headlines you should be aware of. Consistency is key. When someone is searching for an answer, the title doesn’t need to be too jazzy. Numbers. Dates. Something that stands out. When the article is newsy, designed for Discover or a newsletter, the h1 or page title’s got to have some kind of hook.
Meta descriptions - Google rewrites these at a keyword level up to 80% of the time. I honestly don’t think they're worth your time anymore. Maybe just pretend they don’t exist.
Images - Arguably your most clickable entity outside of the headline. Particularly in news. Making sure your image is a) clickable and b) unique is huge. Play around with branded images. Do some research into the type of images that tend to work best for you.
Structured data - Rich results still add value. Reviews, review ratings, authorship et al. With the never ending rise in zero click searches and AI shaping the future of search negatively for publishers, you need to do everything you can.
Building a strong brand - not something you can do at an article level. But people click on brands they trust. If your content outperforms its position in search (i.e. 10% CTR in position 5), you will be upgraded.
Google prefers brands because people do.
We’ve found that images of people looking happy tend to work best for financial content. In news and politics, people looking sad or stressed tend to work better. trial using badges for specific types of content like Google does in Top Stories.
Live badges, ‘by the numbers,’ ‘get the data.’ All things that provide context and may aid clickability.
Step 6: Amplify and share
Once you’ve had a great idea, written it up beautifully, pushed it live and linked to it internally. Your job is done.
No, it isn’t. Particularly if you work for a smaller publisher or start-up. You have to amplify it. Whether that’s through company or personal social accounts. You have to maximise its reach.
You can see why amplification is so important. I have just under 600 followers/subscribers on Substack. But with amplification, email traffic only accounts for 61% of the total.
I share the content on LinkedIn, SEO Fomo news and occasionally in Slack groups if I don’t feel a bit gross doing so. The article then (hopefully) gets shared by others on LinkedIn and Bluesky too. I get hundreds more sessions doing so and importantly, more subscribers.
People are much more likely to convert through a platform like LinkedIn when someone else is sharing it.
Really, this isn’t an SEO thing. There are search benefits associated with sharing an article. Engagement metrics. Links. Mentions. The standard stuff. But it’s not why I do it.
If you work on a solo blog or site, you have to get out there in the industry. Add value. Share your content. Network a bit. Comment. Share other people’s content.
Personal relationships matter.
If you work for a bigger brand, work with your audience, social and/or amplification team. Work out how to maximise coverage for your content. Encourage authors and employees to share the content.
Google has been sending more Discover traffic and less from traditional search for some time. For most publishers, Discover makes up 55-60% or more. So you need to understand it. Particularly as its now coming to desktop.
Discover is more like a social network. It amplifies stories likely to do well. Stories from big brands. Prominent authors. Stories that get shares, mentions and engagement early its lifecycle.
So you have to push your content out there.
How do you know if it’s working?
You need to set some KPIs at a brand, desk/author and article level. If we take traffic and conversions as read. I think the below three are non-negotiables;
Links
Mentions
Shares
More broadly, I think you should also track;
Branded search (for your brand, your product and/or your author)
Direct traffic (at a brand level)
Everything you do should drive real value for your blog, brand or company. Inevitably, that is revenue, secondary conversions (signups) and/or traffic.
Some great examples
Too many to mention, but some I’ve been enjoying recently;
Backlinko for readability
Ahrefs blog for unique content, figureheads and excellent sharing on social platforms
Sparktoro blog with Rand as a figurehead and exceptional unique research
SEO for Google News. Barry’s engaging, sweary style and unrivalled expertise in the news SEO industry
Growth Memo by Kevin Indig. Truly excellent deep dives.
Great read, thanks Harry. Wondering if you've run into any challenges with GSC data when trying to answer this question: "If your content outperforms its position in search (i.e. 10% CTR in position 5), you will be upgraded." The complexities of Search Console's average position metric seem to make it very difficult to spot this kind of outperforming content in an accurate and trustworthy way. Any thoughts?
Once again, a brilliant piece, mate. I'm gonna have to find a way to download your brain into my computer.